Dragged Into Sunlight / Gnaw Their Tongues - N.V.

Pitchfork 55

"That's when my rape fantasies first started, when I was in college," explains the late serial killer Michael Ross, who is centrally featured on the aptly titled "Visceral Repulsion", perhaps the most jarring example of the pointless and even malicious shock that characterizes N.V. A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Maurice "Mories" de Jong, who releases music under several monikers and has put out upwards of 30 records as Gnaw Their Tongues, N.V. ("negative volume") is littered with samples of true-crime confessions from the likes of Ross.

As if his presence weren't unpleasant enough, the sample delves into the various techniques Ross used to murder his victims. Presumably, the team of artists who made N.V. would argue that real-life horror is fair game for evoking a reaction(namely: disgust) with art. In fact, judging from two recent interviews, it seems likely that Dragged Into Sunlight even managed to disturb themselves with this record, and that de Jong draws from headline-news violence in his work because it genuinely frightens him. Not to mention that the sound clips are lifted from TV documentaries that sensationalize these acts while purporting to condemn them.

Still, the inclusion of these samples is flat-out despicable and speaks volumes about how decades of desensitization have blurred not only the lines of good taste but of common decency as well. If N.V. is any indication, actual murder has become indistinguishable from any other image we passively ingest from the safe, numb remove of our computer monitors. Once artists adopt "extremity" as the cowardly affectation that it is, they leave themselves little choice but to keep pushing the envelope. The musicians on N.V. would probably insist that they went this far precisely because they wanted to make the audience feel something. But to indulge them in a rewardless thought-loop by debating their intentions is to allow them to manipulate you and waste your time.

It's a shame, because N.V.'s lurid first-person homicide monologues overshadow its wealth of sonic character. Both of these acts are defined by their (arguably unparalleled) ability to create atmosphere, which makes their yin-yang pairing a natural fit that, on paper, overflows with possibilities. Judging from their respective bodies of work, there's no doubt that Dragged Into Sunlight and Gnaw Their Tongues could have rendered tunes like "Visceral Repulsion" scary—and taken the audience into a truly murderous, sexually depraved headspace—through other, more imaginative means. Pig Destroyer frontman-lyricist J.R. Hayes, for example, scares the daylights out of you and dives even further into the same thematic terrain but manages to get there without trampling on anyone's grave.

Billed as a joint effort, N.V. actually bears the stamp of two other significant contributors, Godflesh/Jesu founder Justin Broadrick and Corrupt Moral Altar drummer-producer Tom Dring. Having produced the first two DIS albums, Dring once again had a hand in shaping the sounds throughout the making of N.V., while Broadrick stepped in as co-producer and sonic overseer later, during the mixing stages. By that point, the initial collaboration had yielded three hours' worth of raw material spanning five years' worth of on-again, off-again back and forth with DIS and de Jong working out of their respective homebases in England and the Netherlands.

Stretched as it was over time, distance, and multiple perspectives, N.V. sounds surprisingly focused and, musically speaking, rather non-indulgent (perhaps because Broadrick, Dring, DIS, and de Jong boiled the final product down to a 32-minute runtime). Broadrick's input is somewhat difficult to discern, but de Jong's touch saturates this music. Even in the spots where Dragged Into Sunlight blasts away and it seems like there's no room to cram in any more sonic information, de Jong is there, hovering like a toxic, mind-altering haze that burns your eyes, chokes your throat, and soaks into your skin -- sensations that are not without their appeal.

Dragged Into Sunlight had already created a sense of psych-ward hysteria with the black-grind hybrid they established as far back as 2008's Terminal Aggressor, and their ability to use raw ingredients like cymbal wash, inhuman-sounding vocal shrieks, reverbs, and delays gave their music a queasy hall-of-mirrors feel that set the band apart from other likeminded peers. On N.V., they turn to Mories as a kind of set designer who fleshes out and brings spacial and tactile dimension to the Liverpool quartet's caustic exorcisms.

Naturally, as an almost supergroup-like meeting of the minds between three highly production-conscious acts, N.V. is crammed with details that don't initially reveal themselves. There's undeniably an art to N.V.'s execution. But even if de Jong and Dragged Into Sunlight grasp the scale of the tragedies they've chosen to rub the audience's nose in, the fact is they're contributing to trivializing the victims in these cases. Will listeners respond to N.V. the way we might once have tittered at the gross-out slasher fantasies on early Cannibal Corpse records, or will they recognize the distinction?

At this stage in the game, metal bands should consider it their creative if not human responsibility to view these well-worn subjects through new lenses. Being "more extreme" for its own sake is not only lame but creatively and ethically bankrupt. That said, there is undeniably an art to N.V.'s execution. Together, its participants combine layers of abrasion that can be rewarding if you can, well, get past the visceral repulsion.